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In-House Counsel

Law Department Management

Comments on every aspect of how best to manage a law department, including how to manage outside counsel. Topics of interest to general counsel and other in-house lawyers who manage legal functions.
By Rees Morrison

Post Frequency: 39.5/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 11:12:47

Global and industry differences in the involvement of Procurement in selections of law firms

Posted on August 06, 2010
Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) from Acritas at 37, summarizes some of the results of a question about procurement?s involvement when a law department selects law firms. Notably, in most of Asia, involvement of procurement is significantly higher...

Cronbach?s alpha, a statistical test of whether questions on a survey get at the same notion

Posted on August 06, 2010
As explained on Wikipedia, Cronbach's ? (alpha) is a statistic commonly used to measure the internal consistency or reliability of survey questions. Alpha is most appropriately used when the items measure different substantive areas within a single construct, such as...

Three main practices in process improvement and two comments

Posted on August 06, 2010
?Processes are collections of activities that, taken together, produce outputs for customers? (See my post of July 13, 2008: processes pulled together with 26 references.). This broad definition comes from the Acad. Mgt. Rev., April 2003, at 240. Continuing, it...

More definitions ? constructs ? on this blog

Posted on August 05, 2010
All of my definitions are efforts to create constructs (See my post of July 19, 2010: comparing the constructs of risk and value.). For the past five years I have assiduously explained what various terms mean and collected those attempts...

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Herfindahl?s index of industry complexity, and two possible applications to law departments

Posted on August 05, 2010
An article in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Aug. 2005 at 662, explains that ?industry complexity refers to the competition in an industry that stems from concentration, or the market share dominance of one or more firms.? The industry becomes more...

Specialization is related to but not the same as steady volume of work

Posted on August 05, 2010
?The observation that unit costs tend to decline at a uniform rate with experience is ubiquitous in the organizational and economic literatures.? What the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Dec. 2005 at 1159, is refers to is called in the management literature...

Alternative fee arrangements might not save money, according to survey results

Posted on August 05, 2010
Managers of law departments take it on faith that alternative fee arrangements (billing terms other than straight hourly, AKA AFAs) at least result in better value for money spent if not reduce total external expenditures. Perhaps that credo is illusory...

Will the numbers reported on alternative fees please stand still a moment?

Posted on August 05, 2010
It is frustrating to lack consensus on such a basic fact as the percentage of fees billed by law firms that are not based on hourly rates, i.e., alternative fee arrangements. AFAs incite a huge amount of publicity, but definitions...

Hyper-specialized software: create USPTO-compliant PDF documents!

Posted on August 05, 2010
Many software companies send me notices of their products, nearly all of which I set aside since there is nothing specific to legal departments or no legal department identified. I broke my own rule, however, when up popped an invitation...

Absorbtive capacity of legal departments

Posted on August 03, 2010
Absorbtive capacity is much discussed in the management literature, as well as in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Dec. 2005, at 999. Absorbtive capacity ?Refers to the ability of organizations and their units to recognize new external knowledge, assimilate it, and...

Low cost is low on the totem pole of what global legal departments deem important

Posted on August 03, 2010
Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) from Acritas at 28,listed eight key service attributes of law firms and asked its hundreds of respondents to rank them. Around 3,000 GCs and other senior buyers of legal services weighed in and...

Pulling up my own SOX ? 19 posts that refer to Sarbanes-Oxley

Posted on August 03, 2010
In light of the recent amendments to Sarbanes-Oxley, I rummaged through my past posts to find earlier references to the original legislation. Several posts considered the hit to legal department budgets that compliance with SOX would entail (See my post...

18 lists on Twitter that include this blog and an analysis of their reach

Posted on August 03, 2010
While looking at Twitter yesterday I noticed ?Lists.? With Lists, which cost nothing to start, Twitter users assemble (follow) Twitter posters in a topical area. My tweets, which are Twitter-sized repeats of what I write here, have made their way...

Differences in legal intensity of industries do not cause assessments of primary firms to vary much

Posted on August 03, 2010
One chart in the excellent report by Acritas, Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) at 26, gives scores from 12 industries for their law departments? satisfaction with their most-used firm. The data includes both the average score and the...

My latest InsideCounsel column: litigation, with a novel metric for total hours devoted to litigation

Posted on August 03, 2010
My most recent column for InsideCounsel, under Morrison on Metrics, ponders a better way to represent litigation metrics. It discusses the shortcomings of case and staff counts. In the end, it sides with staff and even proposes a methodology to...

Major survey finds that definitions of value by legal departments don?t primarily address money

Posted on August 02, 2010
One of the questions covered by Acritas in its thoughtful Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) at 18 is ?What does the term ?value for money? mean to you?? They analyzed the answers to the open-ended question from 476...

Clues to seven koans on ?legal risk?

Posted on August 02, 2010
A few days ago I unveiled seven koans about legal risk (See my post of July 29, 2010: seven paradoxes about risk.). For those of you who have not reached enlightenment, my sketched explanations may spur you on. ?Risk flirts...

Ambiguity in survey on average hourly rates of ?most used firm?

Posted on August 02, 2010
Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) from Acritas at 1 contains a scatterplot that shows the ?average hourly rate for partner at Most Used Firm.? The median of those rates is around $510 an hour. That figure may be...

Paucity of posts on American Express? huge legal department

Posted on July 30, 2010
As I read in Law Tech. News, July 2010 at 38, that American Express has to its credit ?110 attorneys and 90 support staff in 12 countries,? I wondered why there was so little about that department in these pages....

Piling on findings about stress: more control over your workload lessens stress

Posted on July 30, 2010
Several points struck me from an article in Wired, Aug. 2010 at 132, about occupational stress. The most striking is that the higher your position, the less damage stress does to you. The reason for this seeming paradox is that...

Data suggests Chief Legal Officers have done less well on pay than CFOs and CIOs over past five years

Posted on July 30, 2010
Korn/Ferry compiles an annual Index of Global Executive Compensation. A chart in talent mgt., July 2010 at 50 shows form it ?Global First-Year Executive Compensation? for the years 2005 through 2009. Four positions each start at an index score in...

Seven koans on ?legal risk?

Posted on July 29, 2010
Koans are verbal paradoxes contemplated by Buddhists on the path to enlightenment. My homemade koans have more modest goals: to convey some thoughts about the risks grappled with by legal departments. In a few days I will post my explanation...

Too high a percentage of fees estimated to be paid based on ?value-based billing?

Posted on July 29, 2010
An article quotes Susan Hackett, ACC?s general counsel, on ?value-based? billing. Hackett says that ?surveys show the average client laying out between 15% and 30% of their legal spending this way.? The Economist, July 24, 2010, at 72, does not...

A theory of in-house lawyers between the devil client and the deep blue sea

Posted on July 29, 2010
A few days ago, Jon Olson, the thoughtful general counsel of Blackbaud,commented on my post about legal departments as multi-dimensional (mathematical) spaces. He explained his own theory: ?One theory that I find useful is the idea that law departments essentially...

To a degree, a law department that is a ?good corporate citizen? shows value

Posted on July 28, 2010
Showing the value of a legal department can be accomplished in various ways. One way that may be overlooked is to do what the company wants. If the company wants process maps, use Visio for lots of boxes, triangles, and...

Picking apart an effort to collect metrics on knowledge management while still acknowledging the worth of the effort

Posted on July 28, 2010
?Does your law department have a formal knowledge management system or practice?? In answer to this poll on the Association of Corporate Counsel website as of the afternoon of July 25th, 7 people had answered ?Yes? and 32 had answered...

The Big Mac index suggests differences between Europe and North America on a key benchmark should have been wider

Posted on July 28, 2010
Each year the Economist uses the cost of a Big Mac in various countries to compare the official exchange rate to that cost. The magazine uses a standard Big Mac in the US ($3.73) as the index and ranks countries...

Four levels of support for users of software in a legal department

Posted on July 28, 2010
Based on a recent consulting project, I realized there are as many as four levels of people who can help in-house lawyers and others best use their software applications. The first responders are the admins who among themselves can solve...

Latest Rees newsletter published; sign up today to get yours (hint: click on the notice on the right)

Posted on July 26, 2010
Nearly 300 readers have subscribed to my newsletter, and I welcome more. If you sign up in the next few days I will send you the latest edition. It contains the four posts that were viewed the most during the...

Five management theories that apply to outside counsel relations of legal departments

Posted on July 26, 2010
Having covered each of these theories, at least with an introduction but sometimes with multiple posts, I thought it useful to pull them together. Agency ? a principal relies on an agent and problems arise (See my post of April...

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